Socialpunk

It is the year 205X. The world has progressed into near universal connectivity and true globalism, thanks to the now-unfettered power of the Internet. Everything necessary to govern day to day lives of citizens is now handled by communal Social Hubs, run through a network of apps, devices, and web hooks, via the Central API. And because it's all distributed and maintained by principles of share-alike and community development, we're not even under the thumb of some faceless corpo who wants to hide all the algorithms behind a black box. If anybody feels like they can improve the Central API, or modify their device, and submits their changes, the Central Social Hub can present it to a vote and improve on it further if they wish.

And that's largely how the various cities and countries are run, too. Entities like the United States of America, the European Union, NATO, those all still exist. But they're not all being run by seventy-plus-year-old artifacts who grew up under Reaganomics and made their riches by breaking the housing markets. They, too, have their own central Social Hubs, to which anybody can submit issues, upvote or downvote them, push change requests, and with enough Clout, approve or reject them altogether. Gay marriage? Approved by a landslide, globally, over billions of upvotes worldwide, tallied from over ten thousand Social Hubs. The people who downvoted it? Nobody thinks any less of them, probably, but it helps that the votes are all anonymized when they're submitted.

Basically, life is pretty nice. Thanks to the constant collection and distribution of data from around the world, you can figure out how hot it is in a specific area of shade in the corner of the dog park you go to. You can watch the velomobile traffic on the road you'd pedal down to get to the store, in real time, with hotspot alerts following any emergency response vehicles or the occasional tow truck. By now, gasoline-powered vehicles are largely illegal or shunned in use by ordinary citizens; one can still own one, but they require Daily Driver permits (which are harder to get than the equivalents for electric-powered vehicles) if you plan to drive them more than one day per month, and ones for racing or other wasteful activities are heavily regulated in where they can be operated. Most everybody that needs to commute, either takes light-rail or streetcar transport, or pedals their own velomobile (all the comfort and protection of an automobile, in half the size, one-twentieth the weight, and at least one thousand percent healthier). No more concerns of balance, no more falling off and scraping your knee, just a nice shell around you and a set of pedals to run. The old roads still exist; there's no way we could have gotten rid of all of them in the just thirty years since the ratification of the Greener, Newer Deal. But they're a fair bit slower, and a lot safer, since the only people still driving full-size vehicles are the professionals, with their special licenses.

So, ultimately, the people are governing themselves. They can stick to their little in-groups if they want, and that's no problem. Any disagreements get resolved by whoever's nearby, and failing that, a professional negotiator shows up to talk them down. Where's the conflict in this story? Well, like any kind of human "utopia," there are people who seek to destroy, destabilize, and desecrate. It hasn't been all that long since the uprising, after all, and with it still in living memory, there's a good number of people who hate what the system has become. And there's only so much that a Block and Report can do to a person. Our conflict, then, is that some former Clout-holders (from before that became a quantified Thing) were excluded and ostracized from the new Social Hub system, for reason of them being tremendous assholes (or worse). And those people, with their followings, now seek to dismantle what we have. Worse, they have a very real chance of doing it, because when you think about it, those kinds of people have a lot less respect for The Rules when those rules actively run against them.